Editorial: Autumn 2018

We hope you enjoy the autumn edition of The High Window. It is full of rich and varied literary goodness. The poems (and prose poems) are formally inventive, direct, sumptuous and sometimes mysterious from a range of high quality poets, one of whom is Matthew Sweeney who has recently died. Matthew has supported our journal from the outset and he sent two prose poems before he died which echo the work of Baudelaire, but are very much Matthew Sweeney’s own. Reading them one can’t help seeing something of Georges Simenon in them as well, with their vivid pictorial and narrative detail; they are richly imaginative and contain stunning images and heart-felt truths such as…’…the secrets of their lives / were being reopened /. The artist grimaced, smiled, spun in a circle, laughed and cried / real tears.’

We are saddened to hear of his passing, but honoured to publish his work. We are also pleased to announce that further new poems by Matthew have been scheduled for our winter issue and that Keith Hutson will be reviewing My Life as a Painter, Matthew’s latest Bloodaxe collection, in the same issue.

We were also very sorry to hear of the death of Michael McCarthy, another wonderful Irish poet, who sent us a substantial batch of poems shortly before his death. These will be appearing in the next two issues of The High Window.

Elsewhere we have an essay by Sheila Wild on the unsaid in poetry, an interview conducted by Jodie Hollander featuring the work of the American poet, Simon Hunt, a poetry meets art subject in the art feature of Douglas Robertson, and reviews of books by Robert Etty, Robyn Bolam, Denise McSheehy, A.F.Moritz, Sheila Hamilton and Richard Skinner. In the translation section we focus on Catalan poetry and with the help of the translators Anna Crowe, Allison Funk and Nela Bureu Ramos we foreground the work of nine poets writing in Catalan.

Many thanks to our reviewers and poets, resident artist, interviewer, and translators and essayist that have made this our eleventh issue possible.

And thanks to you, our readers, for supporting our magazine, and for sharing news of The High Window.

Finally, regular readers will note that we are not publishing any new poetry collections this quarter. Having brought out three with the previous issue, we feel we need a break! However, we do have a very full and exciting schedule of books in various states of production which will be appearing in due course. We will be publishing a new collection by Wendy Holborrow with our winter issue and thereafter have a full schedule of books for 2019 and on into 2020. We will also be endeavouring to include some submissions guidelines on our Press page in view of the increasing number of enquiries we are receiving.